The appointment of a papal commission by Pope Francis to examine the Vatican Bank has been greeted in the media as a bold move and a key step in reforming the bank. I wish I could be as enthusiastic.

To me it looks like the traditional Vatican approach to dealing with a PR problem: Appoint a committee, mostly clerics, who have no expertise in the topic under study and ask them to come back with a report.

Journalists should “be uncompromising against the hypocrisies which result from the closed, the sick heart,” said Pope Francis to a group of Jesuit journalists. “Be uncompromising against this spiritual illness.”

Telling journalists to attack hypocrisy might sound suicidal to most church leaders, especially after more than two decades of investigative journalism on the sexual abuse crisis, but it shows how much Pope Francis hates the vices he believes undermine the Gospel message: clericalism, careerism and hypocrisy.